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<h2>The Beginning</h2>

<p>On September 30, 1993, a&nbsp;
<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=28flal$sm3@samba.oit.unc.edu&amp;output=gplain">message</a> appeared on the then-newborn newsgroup comp.os.linux.announce:
<blockquote>
<pre>From: hta@uninett.no (Harald T. Alvestrand)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: Counting Linux users: an attempt

Hello,

there have been many attempts at defining the size of the Linux
user base. None of them contained hard data.

Now, in an attempt to establish a lower limit on the number of
Linux users, I have put up a MAIL SERVER that does counting.
......</pre>

</blockquote>
(In fact, the first registration happened only 2 days before, on September 28 - 
this was not a project that did a lot of testing before world-wide deployment!)<p>A few days later, on October 15,
<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=29mco0$2v8@trane.uninett.no&amp;output=gplain">
3000 people had registered</a> - a response both encouraging and challenging!</p>
<p>Little did the brash young engineer behind the message know that this would be the start of 
many years of work, involving people from many continents and hundreds of 
thousands of registrants.</p>

<h2>Growth, change and (some) maturity</h2>

<p>Once the rush had died down, things became boring for a while. Stats were 
fun; twiddling with some Perl programming to give people the option of giving 
more information was fun (and greatly increased the relevance of the &quot;per 
country statistics&quot; that have been a staple of the counter almost since 
inception!)</p>

<p>The next big change was triggered by an email from the Netherlands, from 
Patrick Reijnen, saying &quot;I have made some web pages that send email to the 
counter - are you interested?&quot;</p>

<p>I, then being a neophyte in all things Web, was of course interested - and 
soon after, in December 1994, the first
<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3bpfk9$dr4@kruuna.Helsinki.FI&amp;output=gplain">
Web interface to the Counter</a> was a fact, and the registration rate once 
again hit the roof. People enjoyed the Web!</p>

<p>At this time, the counter was still running on a not very privilleged account 
on a server that UNINETT, the university network of Norway, also used for many 
other things; this can be seen from the counter being located at port 29659 (a 
number derived from my birthday). </p>

<p>After some time, the counter moved to port 80 on its own virtual Web server; 
the
<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=5d5n9o$jo1$1@doffen.uninett.no&amp;output=gplain">
first announcement </a>of the counter at its traditional URL of &quot;counter.li.org&quot; 
is seen in February 1997.<br>
(The name has its own history, btw - being something of a technology purist, I 
resented the &quot;conventional wisdom&quot; that all Web sites should be named &quot;www&quot;, and 
have its own domain name directly under .com - instead, I contacted Linux 
International and got allocated the subdomain &quot;counter&quot; from them, and used the 
domain name directly as the web server name. It works!)</p>

<p>It was not until I moved from UNINETT to EDB Maxware in 1997 that the counter 
(eventually) got its own machine. This was a Pentium 90 with 32 Mbytes of RAM, 
&quot;liberated&quot; from use as a workstation by someone who thought it was too slow. It 
also served as my personal mailserver and a lot of other purposes. But it 
worked!</p>

<p>Just how well it worked could be seen in February 1999, when the counter was 
first <a href="http://counter.li.org/slashdot/">mentioned on Slashdot</a>. 1400 
people managed to get registered that day, and amazingly, the machine worked 
under the load. Just barely!<br>
The next time, with the configuration a little better tuned, 2600 of the 
visitors got registered. A lot at the time!</p>

<p>This, however, left me with a permanent worry on how to enable the service to 
survive if it really became popular; it was clear that &quot;borrowed&quot; hardware was 
not the solution. I talked to friends about it, who talked with friends (the 
most entertaining suggestion was that we should take advantage of MSN's offer of 
nearly-free webhosting :-) - and in October of 1999, thanks especially to the 
efforts of Jim Gettys of X fame, the counter project took delivery of its very 
own <a href="http://counter.li.org/new-machine.php">DEC Alpha server</a>.<br>
Joy - 256 MBytes of RAM, 27 Gbytes of disc - I was in heaven!</p>

<p>The Slashdotting also emphasized to me that the counter had grown larger than 
what a single person could sensibly maintain in his spare time, and that I 
needed help - on May 1, 1999, the Linux Counter Project was &quot;officially&quot; 
registered, and soon after, it had a board of directors selected.<br>
(The founding meeting had only one person present - me - but nonetheless, it got 
started! I tried to register it as an organization in Norway - but the project 
foundered on the fact that an organization in Norway has to have its articles of 
incorporation filed in Norwegian - and I had written them in English; having 
them in Norwegian required the services of an accredited translator. Sigh...) </p>

<p>1999 was also the counter's greatest year - with a sustained registration 
rate of 4000 registrations per month, and peaks of up to 7000 registrations per 
month.</p>

<p>Near the end of 1999, my worry about the data in the counter also increased - 
I knew that many of the people registered had registered once and then 
forgotten. Perhaps they were not even using Linux any more? What could I do to 
make the data more accurate?</p>

<p>The necessary solution was, of course, to invite people to renew their 
entries, and to remove those not renewed. This was not much fun, so it took a 
long time - in January 2001, the reminders started to go out, and in November 
2001, the <a href="http://counter.li.org/news/deletion.php">Great Deletion</a> 
took place, dropping the count from 200.000 to near 120.000.</p>

<p>It's been growing ever since, reaching 138.000 at the time of this writing, 
despite the continued stream of removals. But there are 170.000 dead accounts 
lying in cold storage, waiting for their owners to return and reclaim them.....</p>

<p>Not that everything else has been passive - in early 2002, we noticed that 
certain queries were going exceedingly slowly; it was traced down to a lack of 
RAM on the counter. Rather than buying more memory, a new PC-type box donated 
from Linpro was installed as a dedicated backend SQL server - it didn't solve 
everything, but it made the counter breathe far easier.</p>

<p>And the country managers are managing, our key recovery team is recovering 
keys of users who've lost theirs apace, the off-again, on-again translate 
project is off-again, on-again..... things are happening.</p>

<p>Not fast, not as quickly as I would have liked it to happen - far too much is 
still waiting for me to do something about it, rather than have someone else in 
the volunteer corps do it. But I think the counter can stay around for another 
10 years.</p>

<h2>So why did I do it?</h2>

<p>The answer has varied a bit over the years. First (and foremost) because it 
was fun to do. I could do it - nobody else did it, so I continued, gathering 
fellow wayfarers on the way.</p>

<p>And somehow, even with the many limitations that time, resources and respect 
for privacy placed upon it, it felt like a right thing to do. Letting Linux 
users stand up and be counted, allowing them to bravely publish their existence 
to the world and perhaps find their next-door neighbour to be a Linux user too - 
that seemed to me worthwhile.</p>

<p>Linux is, to me, one of the greatest experiments in social engineering - in 
the sense of doing engineering as a social activity, not in trying to revamp 
society! - that this planet has ever seen. Running the Linux Counter project has 
allowed me to have contacts and see things happening that I would otherwise have 
no way of knowing - getting email from the Norfolk Islands, the backwoods of 
Laos and Antarctica; finding resources and enjoying finding the right ways to 
utilize them; letting a problem stew until the solution was obvious (and, far 
too often, long overdue) - all these, to me, add up to joy in the project.</p>

<p>It's for fun!<br>
&nbsp;</p>

<h2>My wishlist for the next ten years</h2>

<p>A lot of things will undoubtedly happen to the counter over the coming 
decade. I don't think going away will be one of them. Some of the things I want 
to see, some day:</p>

<ul>
  <li>Linus come by to pick up registration number #1 - I reserved it for him in 
  1993, and it's still open</li>
  <li>Internationalization finally happening, with all people able to write 
  their name in their own language - and having the counter help the 
  script-challenged among us figure out what's being written!</li>
  <li>Having the resources to test and tune the counter for performance under 
  load - so that news of the counter isn't something I half fear, half long for, 
  but can be entirely a joyous event.</li>
  <li>Giving the users more benefits from being registered - regional chatrooms? 
  help fora dedicated to specific distributions or hardware? The possibilities 
  are endless, if only the time permits...</li>
  <li>Finally getting the long-promised, never-implemented &quot;group of machines&quot; 
  registration to work</li>
  <li>Implementing security properly, with certs and encryption and all that</li>
  <li>And - of course - a hundred thousand more registered users.</li>
</ul>
<p>Thanks for the joy of the years gone by, and welcome back to the counter for 
the next ten years!</p>

<p>California, september 2003</p>

<p>Harald Alvestrand</p>

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